Will Allen grunts between a giggle and a sneer when asked to reminisce about his playing days at the University of Miami. “Complicated memories,” he says. “Some a bit painful too.”
Back when people called him Willie, Allen became Miami’s first black player to come to Coral Gables and was greeted with nasty letters calling him a racial slur. Others came straight from the Ku Klux Klan in the north of the state. But he’d been lured away from the more familiar borders of Indiana, Penn State, St. Bonaventure and Temple — all interested in the 6-6 High School All-American from Rockville, Maryland — by the glow of the sun, the swaying of the palm trees and before all the promise of basketball. In his senior year, he led the team in goals (19.1 points) and rebounds (12.2) and was eventually drafted by both the NBA’s Baltimore Bullets and the ABA’s Miami Floridians.
After ending his basketball career, Allen relocated to Milwaukee, where he purchased a cluster of old greenhouses and converted them into an urban farming haven that ultimately not only supported impoverished families, but outsourced sustainable farming education around the world. Hailed by both former President Bill Clinton and former First Lady Michelle Obama, he received an “Ingenious Grant” from the MacArthur Foundation and was named one of Time Magazine’s 100 Most Influential People in the World in 2010. Now at 74, he’s still working to develop vertical farming for cities that lack the space for traditional farming.
But as Allen turns the clock back to his playing career in Miami, he still has regrets about the one thing he couldn’t fix. “I tried,” he says, “but I couldn’t save Miami Basketball.”
Miami suspended its basketball program 52 years ago. On Saturday night, the Hurricanes play for a national title, the penultimate step in a revival that only began after 14 years of sleep.
They had no place to play. That was the crux of the matter, or at least that’s what the university authorities were pointing out. Since there is no arena on campus, the Hurricanes trudged about 15 minutes to the Dinner Key Auditorium, an unair-conditioned former naval hangar, or half an hour to the Miami Dade North Junior College campus. Amazingly, not many people followed — even the pep band rarely made the trip. In the 1969/70 season, a total of 19,646 spectators saw the Canes at their 15 home games, with the declining number of spectators putting a financial strain on the sports budget. But little care was taken with the program either – orange uniforms designed for the 1970-71 season, for example, did not arrive on time and were eventually funded by donations.
Team results — the Canes won just nine games in 1969-70 — didn’t help, but it’s a fair chicken-or-egg question to ask whether the team faltered over inattention or the team’s inattention deserved the inattention. Anyhow, things came to a head when an ad hoc committee recommended that the university halt basketball until at least a suitable home arena could be established.
As the season approached, the school wavered over when or if it would pull the plug. Allen, a senior – and deserted by most promising freshmen who saw the writing on the wall and either switched or went pro – decided to force the hand of the administrators. The team captain went to the dorms and gathered his teammates to join him at a hastily called press conference, even though head coach Ron Godfrey was out of town. “Supposedly at a wedding,” Allen says now, his skepticism obvious.
On October 26, 1970, with the rest of the players standing behind him, Allen read from a prepared statement declaring that the Hurricanes were going on strike. “We cannot justify practicing under these urgent circumstances,” Allen read. “As such, we will not be participating in training until a decision is made.” The story was picked up by the Associated Press, with news of the players’ decision to walk circulating in newspapers across the country. “I sometimes wonder if that affected me when I was drafted,” said Allen, who was selected in the NBA’s fourth round despite his 1,293 career points and 916 rebounds. “People might think I was a troublemaker, but I wanted them to make a choice.”
Nine days later, the university decided. Administrators opted to reject the ad hoc recommendation, with University President Dr. Henry King Stanford said he was “staggered” by the passionate response and surprised given how few people have seen the canes in person. “Maybe they didn’t know where we were playing,” Stanford said. The school proposed a temporary bubble to house the team, but area businesspeople pushed back, and the school pledged to have a $3 million bond proposal approved by the City of Coral Gables in the spring to build a new one Build a multipurpose gym on campus.
Excited, the Hurricanes returned to the court and won their first game against Lehigh. But the lack of pre-season and reduced squad led to disaster; The Canes lost their next six and Godfrey resigned before the last game of a 7-19 season. At the time, the canes were so bad, he said, that attending games occasionally made his wife sick and developed hives.
A month later, the board of trustees dropped the sport for good this time. “I think that was always the plan,” Allen says today. “They just felt the pressure after we called them out.”
Speaking to the press, University President Stanford said the board voted to “temporarily suspend basketball until a decent fieldhouse can be built on campus.” He added that he personally has several promising solutions in mind.
The temporary suspension lasted 14 years.
Bob Spiral Mountain didn’t pick up basketball until his junior year of high school, but at 6-8 he quickly found an affinity for the game. He played a season at a local junior college, but with dreams of becoming an architect he began looking into a four-year school. He also thought it might be fun to keep hopping and approached then-Florida head coach Norm Sloan about joining the Gators’ team. This was 1983, so the request required a letter campaign, and consequently it took about a week for Sloan to respond. “He said there was no way I could study architecture and play Division I basketball,” says Spiral Mountain. “The answer was no.” Defeated and on the verge of giving up the game of basketball, Spiral Mountain happened to peek over his father’s shoulder over breakfast one morning and spied a one-paragraph article in the Orlando Sentinel. Miami, it was said, brought basketball back.
Known for his innovative spirit and perhaps even his impatience, Sam Jankovich was just seven weeks into his tenure as Director of Sport when he submitted a report to the Board setting out the reasons for the sport’s resumption. He saw the revenue pour into the tires via television and argued that the area was ripe for talent and a market to sustain it, as he figured the Hurricanes would make $105,000 on television and advertising alone could earn. The football team rolled – that year Howard Schnellenberger led the Hurricanes to the national championship – and while the brand’s concept was still a long way off, Jankovich knew he had to strike while things rolled.
It helped that he came, not hat in hand but money in hand, while two local groups had already raised $500,000 to get the program off the ground. The board liked what they saw, and most importantly liked Jankovich’s energy, which approved the deal and aimed for a 1985 start date with a $50,000 salary for a head coach. In April, Jankovich brought Bill Foster, who had made the football-mad Clemson a winner, out of the ACC and into the Miami darkness with a slightly inflated budget of $125,000.
The school had no facilities yet – the armory was set up as a practice facility – and it also needed players. Foster managed to attract five grantees — Kevin Presto, a 5-11 guard who received no other offers; Dennis Burns, an athletic forward from New Jersey; Tim Harvey, a transfer from Georgia Tech; Tim Dawson, a powerful forward from Baltimore; and Eric Brown, a true Brooklyn blue chipper who was also recruited by Georgetown, St. John’s, Syracuse and Duke and knew nothing of Miami except that Rick Barry was taking his underhand free throws. “Why did I go to the University of Miami?” says Brown, now a police officer in Homestead, Florida. “That’s a really good question. I guess you could say I wanted to start a tradition rather than join an already established one.”
To fill the list, Foster threw a bunch of temporary baskets onto the campus pool deck — “with like the cobblestones that still tended to drain,” says Spiral Mountain — and hosted a three-on-three tournament, in hoping to do it Find additional corpses. Eleven of the 300 people who appeared managed to compete in a scrimmage against the actual scholarship holders. Four walk-ons made the squad that way. Another, Mike Noblet, who played two years at Broward North Junior College, bullied himself into it after his middle school coach convinced staff to try him at scrimmage. “He called us the F Troupe,” says Spiral Mountain, referring to the 1960s slapstick sitcom.
As for the original hurdle, the one that stopped the program in 1971—an on-campus facility—wasn’t actually resolved (nor would it be until 2003). The Hurricanes’ new home after their 1985 Revival debut was the James L. Knight Center, a concert hall that was retrofitted for tires. Miami temporarily brought in seating on one side of the court; the opposite was filled with the original velvet seats for theatergoers. “We played in front of hundreds of fans,” says Brown. “Perhaps.”
But by 1988, the Hurricanes had 19 wins, and even after returning to center and falling back to a 9-19 record in 1991 bad enough to justify Foster’s retirement, Jankovich eyed even bigger plans with his rolling football team.
Leonard Hamilton likes to say that one night during his tenure as Joe B. Hall’s assistant in Kentucky, he lay in his bed dreaming of the high-profile coaching jobs he could one day be. He envisioned basketball-mad cities, with glittering facilities and a program that was done. “And then God reached down from heaven and slapped me on both sides of the face,” says Hamilton, now Florida State’s head coach.
Realizing those jobs didn’t want him, he sought out adversity and began his four-season head coaching career at Oklahoma State. After a 17-14 finish and a second-round appearance at the NIT with the Cowboys, he was looking forward to a solid fifth season with a promising list of players likely to return. Until Jankovich called. “A team that hadn’t been in basketball for 14 years, hadn’t been to the NCAA tournament since 1960, had no conference affiliation and was acting as an independent,” Hamilton says. “It’s my job.”
Leonard Hamilton was the first coach to see success after the program returned to Miami. (Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)
Hamilton agreed to replace Foster and spoke at length with Jankovich about building a culture strong enough to lift the Hurricanes out of their status as independent purgatory. Since the program began in 1984, through Shift and Rebirth, Miami has never had a conference affiliation. Instead, the Hurricanes often played as the well-named guaranteed game, traveling the country serving as sacrificial patsy for powerhouses like UCLA, North Carolina, Marquette, Kansas and Duke. It became part of a vicious cycle, Miami needed the money to bolster their program but not nearly well enough to compete with opponents and elevate their own status.
By 1990, Penn State had made the decision to join the Big Ten, starting the first of the endless dominoes to realign the conference. With three national soccer championships in its trophy cabinet and a heavy reliance on bowl money, Miami began looking for a home, and when Mike Tranghese, then-Big East commissioner, called, Jankovich was more than ready to move. The football deal was pretty sweet, the Hurricanes joined Boston College, Pitt and Syracuse but only shared their bowl and TV winnings with these three other football teams.
As for basketball? “Hmmm. So I’m in a conference with Jim Calhoun, Lou Carnesseca, PJ Carlesimo, Jim Boeheim, Digger Phelps,” Hamilton says, laughing too hard to finish his thought. “I said, ‘Okay, sir. It is what you mean for me?'” In Year 3, the Hurricanes were 8-46 combined in the league and finished that third season 0-18. After losing by 20 points to Villanova in the final game of the regular season, Hamilton returned “He returned to campus from Philadelphia and immediately went to his office. Without even bothering to turn on the light, he sat behind his desk and cried. “What did I do to deserve this?” he says.
There was no quick fix – and still no sight of a facility – but Hamilton refused to complain about what he didn’t have. “It was just a way up,” he says. “I had great employees. Management was supportive. We just had to grind, and he did.” Hamilton initially opted for an organic build-up, luring local players like Steven Edwards, Tim Rich and Steve Rich to stay home and then asking the palm trees and sunshine to wave out of Staters, much like Will Allen decades earlier. In 1998, the Hurricanes made it to the NCAA Tournament and two years later hit a Bonbon 16. “Once you get it going, school is a unique place,” says Hamilton, who left Coral Gables in 2000 to join the Washington Wizards train , and became a coach at Florida State in 2002. “People want to come to Miami, and once we got over the lack of tradition, the city’s beauty did the rest.”
They’re hardly strangers to Miami. They sat in the gleaming Watsco Center and were celebrated at half-time and privately in the dressing room. Jim Larrañaga’s goal is to bring together former players and ask each of them to tell their story so current Hurricanes understand the casualty base they’re on. In fact, Noblet was attending a game recently, and while casually scrolling through the game schedule, he stumbled across an article that chronicled his team’s history.
As Miami marched like crazy through March, they’ve been rolling out their own congratulatory texts and phone calls. “So many of my friends know my story,” Brown says. “You know I’m a part of it, and it means so much to me.”
Now that they get to see the once unthinkable, a 38-year-old toddler on a basketball program playing for a shot at the national championship, they’re excited to see it in person. Snail Mountain will start from Florida on Thursday. Noblet plans to fly. If Brown can find a reasonable airfare, he will also travel to Texas, and Allen was also considering a trip to Houston. “I’m hoping to get some tickets,” says Allen. “But whether I can make it or not, I know I’m part of it. Part of that story.”
(Top Photo: Mitchell Layton/Getty Images)